American drama in the first half of the 20th century

Drama was the least popular genre in America since Puritans hated it as work of devil and during the Revolution it was officially banned as useless expensive entertainment. In addition, there was no copyright so companies were stealing British plays. Plays based on novels like The Last of Mohicans and Uncle Tom's Cabin were popular but it was seen as entertainment for the whites and later on destroyed by cinema. In beginning of 20^th century main influences on American theatre were realists J. B. Shaw and Henrik Ibsen and realism started to appear in American drama.

Drama never had wide audience, only Broadway commercial musicals were popular and later Hollywood motion pictures which made it even more difficult for playwright to live from their writing. After WW1 two main companies were founded and started new theatrical era - Province Town Players and Washington Square Players and The Group Theatre and as first one decided to put on stage American playwrights and even modernist plays.

1930s is considered golden age of American theatre but American dramatists did not influence European theatrical scene. Broadway of New York became a bit balanced with off-Broadway avant-garde theatre but most Americans preferred to watch TV dramas instead so theatre-going was limited to sophisticated audience.

ELMER RICE (1892-1967) was a son of a Jewish emmigrand family. He studied law but got bored with it and became a playwright instead. That is why his first play On Trial is set at the court. He wanted to bring expressionism to theatre so he used flashbacks as theatrical technique and revolving stage (stage turns to those who currently speak, in this case either a victim or jury). Street Scene (1929), the social realist play, uses modernist multiple action technique as he is giving stories of many different characters that present their point of view on the same thing.

The Adding Machine (1923) is a satire, mocking criticism of modern technical society in which the  importance of machines got higher than workers. Characters do not have names, only numbers, they all look the same, only colour of the clothes differ. In a bedroom Mrs. Zero engages in a monologue directed at her husband. Mr. Zero has been a failure, holding the same dead-end job as a department-store clerk for years. They do not listen to each other and conversation is often nonsensical. Mr. Zero finds his sole pleasure in peeping at prostitute in a room across the way. His wife has forced him, however, to report the girl to the police. In the department-store, Mr. Zero sits face-to-face with Daisy. She is calling out figures, which he enters into a ledger. They fail to express love they secretly feel for each other. Mr. Zero imagines confronting his boss and successfully demanding a raise. However, the boss does not even know his name as he little cares about employees, just business. The boss informs Zero that they are planning to install adding machines and thus he will no longer need him. Losing control, Zero kills the boss by stabbing him with a bill file.

Meanwhile Mrs. Zero is impatiently waiting for her husband at home. Guests arrive—six couples dressed alike and having numbers instead of names, Mr. and Mrs. One, Mr. and Mrs. Two, and the like. Men try to differentiate by wearing colourful wigs to seem more intellectual but speaking in robot like fashion, all express the same views, lost in conformity of middle-class and the same prejudices: "Politics is a man’s business"; "Woman’s place is in the home"; "America for the Americans." The talk is interrupted by a policeman ringing the doorbell. Zero says that he has been expecting the officer: He knows that he must pay the penalty. The scene of Zero's trial consists of a stream-of-consciousness monologue by Zero to the jury. He admits his guilt but he blames the boss for firing him. The jurors, the same people who were the guests at his party, shout in unison, "GUILTY!" Zero is caged like an animal in a zoo while a guide describes him as "the North American murderer." When offered an eight-course dinner of his choice as his final meal, he lacks the imagination and orders eight courses of ham and eggs to show conformity. Toward the end of the scene, a strange figure who identifies himself as the Fixer is introduced. He rebuffs Zero’s desperate pleas and when his assistants drag Zero off for execution, the Fixer sits reading the newspaper comics.

Another scene is set in a graveyard. The prostitute whom Zero had reported to the police, enters with a young man and sees an opportunity to have her revenge by engaging in sexual intercourse on Zero’s grave. Then Zero arises from his grave and meets another corpse, Shrdlu. Shrdlu had killed his overprotective mother and now expresses his longing to be punished. Next scene features the green meadows of the Elysian Fields which was a place of eternal happiness for Greeks. When he meets Daisy, who has committed suicide because of her unhappiness over Zero, the two acknowledge their love for each other, kiss, and then dance wildly. Hearing someone approach, however, Zero tells Daisy to fix her hair and pull down her skirt showing he was influenced by Puritan strict morality.

When Shrdlu tells them that they can stay together in the Elysian Fields without getting married, Zero is shocked at the thought and expresses his wish to return to earth and the "respectable" society. When he asks whether she will remain in the Elysian Fields, Daisy answers that, with Zero gone, it makes no difference and thus she "might as well be alive." In the final scene, Zero is operating a giant adding machine, when Lieutenant informs him that he must return to earth to begin again as a baby. When Zero wonders whether he had been a king in a previous life, the man informs him that in his past incarnations he had been a slave several times. Mr Zero has always been a limited, below average, stuck failure without own opinion. The man  promises him that a beautiful young girl named Hope will accompany him and help him forget. The play closes with Lieutenant complaining: "Hell, I’ll tell the world this is a lousy job!"

EUGENE O´NEILL (1888-1953) was the first major playwright and the only one awarded Nobel Prize, connected to Province Town Players. He came from the family of actors and he actually did not want to continue in the tradition but after his nervous breakdown and being sent to sanatorium, he studied Greek drama and Freud, he became interested in it.

Long Day´s Journey Into Night is his most influential play, partly autobiographical, based on his father's life. The main protagonist is a talented actor who gets his dream role in Monte Christo and because the play is successful he keeps playing this one role many years and 30 years later he realises he wasted his talent, his wife is addicted to morpheme and sons became alcoholics.

His Greek influence can be seen in Mourning Becomes Electra based on the notion that Greeks believed fate cannot be avoided (Electra´s complex = daughter-father relationship). In The Great God Brown the protagonist is wearing a mask so we never know his real face and character but it was original only in America, Greek actors always wore masks.

MAXWELL ANDERSON (1888-1959) decided to bring back drama written in verse in his Winterset which was based on Elizabethan drama, influenced by Shakespeare, based on trial of two anarchists accused of treason and put on electric chair. What Price Glory? was more realistic and appealing, dealing with WW1 in unusual way by describing common soldiers who did not know what they were fighting for.

THORNTON WILDER (1897-1975) received a Pulitzer Prize for Our Town (1938), a play close to Edgar Lee Master's The Spoon River anthology. It depicts inhabitants of small town, both living and the dead, telling their little life stories. Skin of Our Teeth is presenting one family in last 3000 years moving from prehistoric age to present, showing that family face the same problems all over again (shelter, food, relationship), expressing a cyclic view of history.

His The Matchmaker was turned into a famous comedian musical Hello Dolly. It is about Dolly, a New York matchmaker who merrily arranges all kinds of things and even lives. Being a widow, she falls in love with a rich merchant and proceeds to weave a web of romantic complications involving him and other people around them. Eventually all is sorted out and everybody ends up with the right person.

CLIFFORD ODETS (1906-1963) was of Jewish origin and many of his characters are Jewish as in Awake and Sing featuring an old Jewish barber who wants a revolution that would change America back to its roots. Golden Boy gave him most commercial success but it was Till the Day I Die that became the first American play warning against fascism. However, as he had no first-hand experience about the situation in Germany, the play is very sentimental. He depict Gestapo members as confused people who only obey orders and celebrated Russian engineers as carriers of progress. Because of that, the play was not well received.

Waiting for Lefty (1935) was unique for its blackouts, the fact there is no main character, no changing of the scene (bare stage without coulisses because it disturbs attention), language of working class and co-operation with audience as actors talk directly to the audience and one of the actors is sitting in the audience and talking to the stage. Odets breaks aesthetic distance since normally a viewer should have a distance to evaluate. It has been taken as communist propaganda but it is not! Socialism is anything that supports rights of workers. On the other hand, communism is a philosophical movement of equality where people will take only what they need without need of money – impossible utopia. In the play the workers only ask for their rights. The story revolves around a strike of taxi drivers for higher wages and is supposed to by organised by Lefty who, however, does not appear at all so the play is similar to Waiting for Godot.